Every day, people send and receive millions of electronic messages, such as e-mail, over computer networks for business and leisure. Indeed, e-mail (also written as “email”) has become an extremely popular communication channel for people to exchange information.
There are times when users want to listen to e-mail or other electronic messages, rather than view them (e.g., while driving). Accessing e-mail during such times requires speech recognition to navigate the e-mail list verbally, as well text-to-speech synthesis to read out the e-mail to the user.
Unfortunately, present “e-mail by voice” systems permit very few actions to be performed on e-mail messages besides listening to them. Thus, it would be highly desirable to more efficiently manipulate e-mail and other electronic messages by voice.